We all know online music is quite the rage. With sites like Pandora, Last.fm, Grooveshark, and Slacker Radio, we can be even lazier in our music selecting experience. Gone are the days when we need to manually discover new artists and songs, with the onset of an era dedicated to finding us music we enjoy with the click of a button. I'm okay with that.

New site, Shuffler, provides a different spin on the online streaming music experience. The site works sort of as a mix between Pandora and StumbleUpon. At the home screen, you are provided with several different channels to select from based on musical interest. I'm listening to the Electronic channel now. Fist pump!

After selecting a channel, you are then taken to a musical blog within that genre and the tunes begin the play. At the top of the screen is a StumbleUpon-esque bar, allowing you to move on to the next blog within that channel, change the channel, or share the current blog through social media outlets.

My first impression of Shuffler is excellent. I love the ability of being offered...

Everyone knows that the BFG crew loves the Jersey Shore; we write about their social media and marketing efforts all the time. And we’re not alone. Paul Morse over at Row Feeder decided to follow the social media impact of the Jersey Shore season two premiere and created this lovely infographic (above).

I just love metrics, don’t you? Particularly in graph format. This one includes a swanky looking chart with the number of tweets and Facebook posts every 15 minutes. The Twitter spike on the east coast when the show premiered is insane at around 16,000 posts every 15 minutes. It’s also interesting to see how different the Twitter response is from the Facebook response, and how the spike when the show started on the west coast is so much smaller. The national audience map (the one at the bottom that sort of looks like a virus outbreak chart from the CDC) also shows the impressive east coast following of the show, noting that around 21 percent of all posts about Jersey Shore came from New York or New Jersey. I’m sure the average follower score was somewhat skewed from all the celebrities posting, but the almost two posts per person shows how engaged many viewers were. All in all, I’d say the social media marketers over at MTV deserve a self-congratulatory fist-pump.

Last night app developer Flipboard launched their self-titled social magazine app for the iPad. Flipboard communicates with your social media accounts, aggregating the best videos and articles that your friends and followers are mentioning and linking to. This content can then be viewed through Flipboard in a magazine style layout. Flipboard presents an interesting concept that may widely catch on with iPad user's daily habits.  The interface design and layout makes it an attractive download to add to your app collection. Plus it's free, and I'll try anything that is free once (ok, maybe not everything). View the video above to learn more.

Let’s be honest: Nick Cage even without that horrendous haircut and Stevie Nick’s wardrobe is enough to keep most people from the box office. So Disney has spared no expense promoting Sorcerer’s Apprentice in new and interesting ways.

We wrote about Disney purchasing the first ever promoted tweet for Toy Story 3 a few weeks back. Apparently, it went so well, they’ve also bought another promoted tweet for Sorcerer’s Apprentice. And they’ve also become the first to try Twitter’s new @EarlyBird service, a “deal of the day” promotion announced just last week, again for Sorcerer’s Apprentice. @EarlyBird will retweet promotions to its audience of around 45,000 for some undetermined fee. However, Disney’s own account has 54,000, so right now it seems the PR behind Disney being the first is more important than the benefits from @EarlyBird.

They’ve also rolled out an impressive interactive display window at the 34th Street Macy’s where, using technology similar to Microsoft’s new Xbox Kinect, you can play a game based on the movie. The game lets you wave your arms to throw plasma balls, levitate mops, ect, and once you’re done, it takes your photo, shoves your head onto Nick Cage’s body and (of course) lets you upload the appalling result to Facebook.

If you’re...

Several weeks ago, members of the Boston sports media received cryptic t-shirts that read: Help Vince!. There was little, to no, explanation. Yesterday, the meaning of the words on the shirt was finally revealed. Vince Wilfork, defensive lineman for the New England Patriots, has had his Super Bowl ring "stolen" by a Jets fan. The Patriots are asking their fans to "Help Vince" find his ring through a series of challenges.

The promotion was launched in conjunction with SCVNGR (based in Cambridge, MA), an up-start, location based game for your iPhone or Android device. On the surface the app sounds similar to other location based applications such as Foursquare or Gowalla. What SCVNGR does better, is to offer more of a game based element in the form of challenges, which can be part of a bigger Trek. By completing these you earn points, the more you explore, the more points you receive. They offer a much better scavenger hunt platform than their more well known location based competitors. Groups are able to customize Treks and users can earn points for checking in, snapping a picture, scanning a QR code, etc.

In the case of the Patriots promotion, fans are asked to complete challenges all over New England. The top scorer will win lunch with a Patriots player, including 3 friends, after the close of the 2010-2011 football season. The Patriots are also using their Twitter feed to push clues out to their followers, as well as traditional media outlets to gain attention.

The result of this effort by the Patriots...